Latest news with #VargasLlosa
Wall Street Journal
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Misjudging Peruvian Vargas Llosa
Tunku Varadarajan's op-ed 'Vargas Llosa Stood for Freedom Against the Nationalist Tide' (April 16) is troubling despite its intent to praise Mario Vargas Llosa. The claim that the most striking thing one can say about Vargas Llosa is that he was 'a great and exemplary Spaniard' is baffling. Though he held Spanish citizenship, Vargas Llosa remained Peruvian in his civic commitments, literary imagination and identity. He fled authoritarianism, not his country. To claim otherwise is to erase the roots that defined him and to diminish the tension that made his literature so universal. Mr. Varadarajan's portrayal of Vargas Llosa's 1990 electoral loss as a matter of racial aesthetics is dismissive of Peruvian voters' political agency. Alberto Fujimori's appeal rested on anti-elitism and frustration with entrenched political classes. Though Vargas Llosa lost that presidential contest, his classical-liberal ideals prevailed and helped shape Peru's institutional trajectory. The country's sound currency, stable central bank and ongoing constitutional accountability bear his influence.
Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
Plan to honour Mario Vargas Llosa stirs up Catalan separatists
The romantic passions of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Latin American literary giant, embraced the women he adored and the places that enchanted him. But the love that the Nobel prize-winning Peruvian had for Barcelona, the city he credited with establishing him as a writer, may be unrequited, at least officially. Vargas Llosa, who died this month aged 89, opposed Catalan separatism with such vehemence in later life that calls for Barcelona to name a street in his honour face stiff opposition from the region's nationalists. Aleix Sarri, a leader of the Catalan separatist Junts party, said: 'Vargas Llosa was an irredeemable anti-Catalan, he legitimised repression and always lined up in favour of the colonial forces. Our country has no reason to pay special tribute to
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mario Vargas Llosa: The novelist who lectured Latin America
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Fact and fiction circled each other in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa. Through realism, erotica, and even crude slang, the Peruvian novelist wove tales of political corruption and moral compromise. As part of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s—alongside Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina's Julio Cortázar—he reached international fame, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010. But unlike most other regional giants, he never embraced leftist politics. While his fictional works appeared to support revolution and speaking truth to power, his expository essays tended toward conservatism. He even unsuccessfully ran for president of Peru in 1990 as a right-winger, proposing to privatize state enterprises and lay off public-sector workers. "If you're a writer in a country like Peru or Mexico, you're a privileged person because you know how to read and write," he said. "It is a moral obligation of a writer in Latin America to be involved in civic activities." Born in Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up in Bolivia, where his mother told him his father was dead. In fact, his parents had divorced before his birth; they reunited when he was 10 and soon packed him off to military school in Lima. He retaliated by writing a novel, 1963's The Time of the Hero, a scathing account of life in a military academy that portrayed officers as abusive and corrupt. Scandalized generals denounced the book, which only turned it into a sensation. At 19, Vargas Llosa eloped with his uncle's 29-year-old sister-in-law, inspiring his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. "His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration," said The New York Times, but he refused to live there. Instead, he spent decades in Europe, feted as an international literary star. "His fame and swelling ambition fueled his run for president," said The Washington Post. But he came across as an elitist and failed to win over Peru's largely impoverished indigenous electorate. Chastened, he returned to Europe and became a columnist for Spain's El País, espousing his love of free markets to a global readership. "His combative defense of this position earned him enemies" among Latin America's left, said The Guardian. Yet he maintained his dedication to his craft. Writing "is a way of living with illusion and joy and a fire throwing out sparks in your head," he said. "This is an experience that continues to bewitch me as it did the first time."
Express Tribune
15-04-2025
- General
- Express Tribune
Peru mourns Mario Vargas Llosa
The Peruvian flag flew at half-staff Monday as the South American country marked the passing of literary great Mario Vargas Llosa with a day of national mourning. Tributes poured in from around the world as President Dina Boluarte attended a private wake at the Vargas Llosa family home for the novelist and Nobel laureate who died there Sunday aged 89. The remains of the author of such acclaimed works as Conversacion en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) and La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981), will be cremated in a private ceremony. Wreaths of white flowers decorated the outside of the family home in Lima's Barranco neighborhood, where admirers gathered clutching Vargas Llosa books. Some were in tears. "His passing will mark a before and after in the history of world literature," one of them, 30-year-old artist David Marreros, told AFP. Added philosopher Gustavo Ruiz, 55: "I am shedding tears because he was a very important reference for me. He used to say that 'literature saved my life' and I always use this phrase." The Nobel Prize committee, meanwhile, hailed Vargas Llosa as "a significant figure in Latin American literature and culture." Reflecting on his deep love of storytelling and use of rich language, it recalled that he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." 'Loved and admired' Boluarte, dressed in a black suit, was received for the wake by Vargas Llosa's son Alvaro, who briefly addressed journalists at the entrance to the family home. "My siblings Gonzalo and Morgana and I would like to express our infinite gratitude for the displays of affection that we are receiving from all over Peru, from friends, acquaintances and anonymous people who loved and admired my father," he said. He also expressed thanks for condolences that have been pouring in from around the world. The family has not specified the author's cause of death, but his health had been deteriorating in recent months. The Peruvian flag was flown at half-staff at municipalities, military and police barracks and public institutions in compliance with a day of national mourning decreed by the government. In Lima, bookstores displayed Vargas Llosa's works prominently in their windows, and offered discounts. And at the Leoncio Prado Military School, where Vargas Llosa studied and where one of his novels is set, the cadets paid tribute by forming human lines spelling out the writer's initials. After the private vigil at his home, Vargas Llosa's remains were transferred to a military crematorium in Lima in a dark wooden coffin on a hearse followed by a procession of cars. 'Master of the word' Born into a middle-class Peruvian family, Vargas Llosa was one of the greats of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, along with Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Argentina's Julio Cortazar. Rumours of the writer's deteriorating health had spread in recent months, during which he had been living out of the public eye. He celebrated his 89th birthday on March 28. The writer's "intellectual genius and enormous body of work will remain an enduring legacy for future generations," Boluarte posted on X. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum paid tribute to Vargas Llosa as a "great writer," while Chile's Gabriel Boric praised his ability to chronicle Latin America "with a pen of real tears in delicate and thought-provoking fiction." Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sent a message on X in which he thanked the "universal master of the word" for books he said were "key to understanding our times." Vargas Llosa's works were translated into some 30 languages. A Francophile, he lived in Paris for several years, but also in Madrid and Barcelona. His family said there would be no public memorial, in accordance with instructions left by Vargas Llosa himself. afp
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Political Novelist Who Never Stood Still
'At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?' So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you've asked it yourself. Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book. I devoured his novels before and after emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1980s. For many of us Latin Americans, reading him was a way to demonstrate our investment in the region's future. His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic; what fascinated me just as much was the elasticity, over decades of profound change, of his politics. I got to know Vargas Llosa in his later years, after he had lost a run for president of Peru and won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He and I shared an agnostic attitude toward government. It is frequently said that doubt is the engine of intelligence, and he had a great deal of both. His omnivorous intellect went from one topic to another, exploring them in minute detail. Like most members of his generation—the authors of the so-called literary Latin American boom of the 1960s and '70s, which put the region on the cultural map—he entered adulthood as a Marxist. Indeed, his education was defined by the Cuban Revolution. In a part of the world where illiteracy runs rampant, he was convinced that writers aren't entertainers but spokespersons of the silent majority. That means that they must stand up to power. Not surprisingly, Vargas Llosa's early novels, inspired by the type of social realism that prevailed after the Second World War, are at their core antiauthoritarian. Because he had come of age under right-wing dictatorships, he believed that Peru's antidemocratic spirit was rooted in the inquisitorial habits brought over by the Europeans during the conquest. Underlying Conversation in the Cathedral is a critique of the regime of Manuel A. Odría, who was the president of Peru in the 1950s. [In the February 1984 issue: Latin America: A media stereotype] Over time, Vargas Llosa realized that this kind of reflexive leftism was naive. The turning point came in 1971, when the prominent Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned for speaking out against Fidel Castro's Communist regime, which by then had aligned itself with Moscow. While other 'Boomistas,' including Vargas Llosa's pal and onetime roommate Gabriel García Márquez, looked the other way, he ferociously denounced the curtailing of free speech. (He broke off contact with García Marquez in 1976 after punching his old friend in the face on the night of a film screening.) But Vargas Llosa didn't stop there. He also accused the Havana government of intolerance, allergy to free enterprise, and overall narrowmindedness. As a result, he quickly became a persona non grata in Latin American intellectual circles. This was the spark that his ferociously independent spirit needed, and it deepened his literary work. His move toward the ideological center is clear in The War of the End of the World, published in 1981—my favorite Vargas Llosa book. It is about a real-life religious fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro, in Brazil's 19th-century hinterlands, who established an autonomous republic made up of outlaws, sex workers, and beggars. The novel is a cautionary tale about populist leaders who are incapable of separating their need for adulation from the needs of their constituents. I read it almost in a single sitting when it came out. Vargas Llosa's absolute command of the craft made clear that a key role of the novelist is to use fiction to explain the excesses of power. But when, in 1990, he persuaded himself that he could be Peru's president, Vargas Llosa turned his own lessons upside down. Some critics called his campaign quixotic. There is a difference between quixotic and foolish. Throughout his run, he seemed like a fish out of water—an expression he played with for the title of the account he wrote, a few years later, about his misbegotten adventure. Not only did he lose embarrassingly, but he became a sort of avatar for Conselheiro, rallying the faithful less through reason than through charismatic fervor. He left Peru in a rush, having expeditiously secured a Spanish passport. His followers were furious. I myself thought he was a coward. We all stopped reading him. We were looking for answers to the quagmire that is Latin America, and they surely couldn't come from a buffoon. In Spain, however, Vargas Llosa again found a new calling. He continued meddling in politics, but more cautiously now. And he persevered in the art of the novel, although his audience was fractured (with the exception of his rapturously received 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the tyrant of the Dominican Republic). His coup de grâce, and the reason I reached out to him, was the launch in 1990 of a syndicated column, 'Piedra de Toque' ('Touchstone'), for the Madrid newspaper El País and its various Latin American editions. This perch allowed Vargas Llosa to comment on just about every topic he fancied, including films and fashion. [Read: Vargas Llosa returns to his peaks] These were only appetizers, though. Politics was always his main course. The magic wasn't only in the style he perfected—that of a thinker digesting the contradictions of power—but in his shifting stances. In columns and speeches, he condemned the Muslim fundamentalists who conducted the Charlie Hebdo attacks and frequently assailed Vladimir Putin as a dictator. He traveled to Gaza and the West Bank, interviewing people involved with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His views on Zionism were nuanced, denouncing extremism on both sides. He believed in a two-state solution, although he could also be disheartened about its prospects. He referred to ours as 'the civilization of the spectacle.' The ideological metamorphoses Vargas Llosa went through are not so uncommon these days: from the left to the right and vice versa, from peaceful discourse to revolutionary rhetoric, from a democratic stand to the belief in a centralized power and back. Orthodoxies no longer hold, and extremes coexist. There is, in fact, nothing unpredictable in the author's evolution. Marxists end up ardent proponents of market economies, anti-colonialists mutate into eager interventionists, and nativists fall in love with cosmopolitanism. Most of us are more complex—and more interesting—than labels allow for. Vargas Llosa embodied those contradictions with pride, turning them into art. I wrote to thank Vargas Llosa for his reluctance to be pigeonholed. Even when I disagreed with him—I often did—I cherished his courage to offer alternative routes of thought. We became friends, emailing on a variety of topics. I had been meaning to write again about that famous opening of Conversation in the Cathedral when I found out (from the news, like most everyone else) that he had died. I'd wanted to ask him if Peru might be seen as a synecdoche for countries all over the world—then and now. In other words, could the question at the outset of the novel be applied today to the United States—a bastion of democratic strength being ripped apart by an erratic tyrant? Years ago, in one of his lucid columns, Vargas Llosa described the election of Donald Trump as a form of national suicide. Is Trump—I wanted to ask—like Odría, Trujillo, and Castro? In lieu of an answer, I recommend reading the novel again, now as a kind of surrogate fiction about a country in search of meaning, by a writer ready to confront our most pressing fears. Article originally published at The Atlantic
